Mother's Capable Hands

"Mum's help always came with instructions. Tonight I needed it anyway."

The door opened before I'd finished speaking.

Mum stood there in her dressing gown, the hall light behind her casting her face into shadow. I couldn't see her expression, but I could feel her attention—that immediate, assessing focus that had guided a thousand preschool crises, that could evaluate a situation in seconds and begin marshalling resources before most people had even registered there was a problem.

"Claire?" Her voice was sharp with concern. "What's happened? What's wrong?"

I opened my mouth to answer and found I couldn't. The words that had been pouring out moments before—I'm losing my mind—had dried up, and in their place was just this horrible pressure in my chest, this tightness in my throat, this feeling of everything being too much and too close and too real.

Mum didn't wait for an explanation. She reached out, took my arm, and pulled me inside.

The hallway was warm after the cold of the night, and the familiar smell of the house wrapped around me—lavender from the bowl of potpourri on the side table, something faintly lemony from the cleaning products Mum favoured, the particular scent of a home that had been lived in for decades. I let myself be led, too tired to resist, too raw to pretend I was fine.

The kitchen light was already on. The yellow walls glowed in the overhead light, and the strawberry-patterned curtains were drawn against the darkness outside, and it was so familiar, so achingly unchanged, that something cracked open in my chest.

"Sit down," Mum said, guiding me to a chair at the kitchen table. "I'll put the kettle on."

I sat. The chair was hard beneath me, wooden and straight-backed, the same chairs that had been here since I was a child. I watched Mum move around the kitchen—filling the kettle, setting it on its base, clicking it on.

"Now," she said, turning to face me, her arms folded across her chest in that particular way that meant she was bracing for bad news. "Start from the beginning. What's happened?"

The beginning. Where was the beginning? Was it tonight, the argument, the window? Was it last week, when Sandra bloody Fitzgerald had turned up at the studio unannounced, demanding to speak to me about her precious daughter's solo? Was it months ago, years ago, the slow accumulation of distance between Paul and me that had led to this moment?

"It's been—" I stopped. Swallowed. Tried again. "You know Sandra Fitzgerald? Maddie's mum?"

Mum's expression flickered—recognition, and something else beneath it. Wariness, maybe. "The one who complained about the concert costumes last year?"

"She just turned up," I said, the words coming faster now, tumbling out of me. "Didn't even call. Just appeared at the studio, wanting to 'discuss' why Maddie didn't get the lead in the spring showcase. As if I owe her an explanation. As if her daughter's mediocre pirouettes entitle her to waltz in and question my artistic decisions."

The kettle was starting to hum, that low rumble that preceded the boil.

"And Paul—" I heard my voice crack and hated it, hated the weakness, hated that I couldn't hold myself together even now. "Paul just sat there. When I told him about it, when I needed him to understand what I deal with, he just... he didn't care, Mum. He doesn't care about any of it. About me, about my work, about anything except his own—"

I couldn't finish. The pressure in my chest was too much, the words too tangled with everything else—the argument, the window, the hours of silence, the empty phone, the cold house, all of it pressing down on me until I couldn't breathe.

Mum was watching me with that careful expression, the one I remembered from childhood—the look she got when she was listening for what wasn't being said, when she was trying to determine the true shape of a problem beneath the surface presentation.

"What happened with Paul, love?" she asked quietly.

The kettle clicked off. The steam rose in a thin white column, dissipating into the warm air of the kitchen.

"Paul left, Mum." The words came out flat, drained of everything. "Just walked out. Early evening, didn't say a word. No explanation. Nothing."

A pause. Then, gently: "You don't know that yet, love. He might—"

"No, Mum." My voice cracked again, that horrible splintering sound that I couldn't control. "He left. I caught him climbing out the bloody window! Took his phone, took his charger, took his bloody wallet. And now he's ignoring me. He won't answer his goddamn phone."

I heard the words hanging in the air between us, heard how they sounded—hysterical, unhinged, the ravings of a woman who'd lost her grip. But they were true. Every word was true. He'd climbed out a window. He'd taken his things. He wasn't answering his phone. These were facts, not fabrications, and I needed Mum to understand that, needed someone to see what had happened and confirm that I wasn't crazy, that this wasn't normal, that a man climbing out a window to avoid his wife was not something I should just accept.

Mum moved to the kettle. Her back was to me as she poured the water, and I couldn't see her face, couldn't read her reaction.

"The window," she said, and her voice was careful, neutral. "He actually climbed out the window?"

"Into the roses. My David Austins." The laugh that escaped me was sharp and strange, not really a laugh at all. "He fell into the bloody roses and then just... got in his car and drove off. Didn't even look at me. Didn't say a single word."

Mum set a mug in front of me. The tea was pale, not steeped long enough, but warm, and I wrapped my hands around it just to have something to hold. She sat down across from me with her own mug, and for a moment neither of us spoke. The clock on the wall ticked. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere in the back of the house, in the sewing room where my children slept, there was silence.

"He's done this before," Mum said. It wasn't a question.

"Not the window." I stared at the tea I wasn't drinking. "But the leaving. The silence. The... he retreats, Mum. Whenever things get hard, whenever I try to talk to him about anything that matters, he just shuts down. Goes somewhere I can't reach him. And then he comes back, and we pretend nothing happened, and nothing changes, and it just keeps—"

I couldn't finish. Couldn't articulate the endless cycle, the exhausting pattern that had defined my marriage for years. The hoping and the disappointment and the hoping again, the same dance repeated until I'd forgotten there was any other way to move.

Mum was watching me over the rim of her mug. Her eyes were tired—of course they were, it was the middle of the night and I'd turned up on her doorstep like a child fleeing a nightmare—but there was something else there too. Something that looked like worry, but also like recognition. Like she was seeing something she'd seen before, had maybe been waiting to see, had dreaded and expected in equal measure.

"What if he's..." I stopped. Swallowed. The words felt dangerous, saying them out loud. "What if he's really gone this time?"

Mum didn't answer right away. She took a sip of her tea, set the mug down carefully, and looked at me with that steady gaze that had guided me through every crisis of my childhood, every teenage heartbreak, every adult disappointment.

"Then you'll deal with it," she said finally. "The way you've dealt with everything else. One step at a time."

It wasn't comfort, exactly. It wasn't the reassurance I wanted—he'll come back, it'll be fine, you're worrying over nothing. It was something else. Something more pragmatic and less soothing, something that acknowledged the possibility I'd voiced without either confirming or denying it.

I should have been grateful for her honesty. Instead, I felt something hot and sharp flare in my chest—resentment, maybe, or just the desperate wish that someone would tell me what I wanted to hear instead of what they thought I needed to know.

"I need them to stay here for a few days," I said, changing the subject because I couldn't bear to stay on the other one. "Just while I sort things out."

Mum nodded. No hesitation, no questions about logistics or schedules or how long "a few days" might actually mean. "That's fine. You get yourself sorted. They'll be alright here."

Of course they would. They were always alright here, in this house that had sheltered me and Amelia through our own childhoods, that now offered the same steady refuge to the next generation. Mum would feed them proper breakfasts and maintain their routines and answer their questions with the calm competence she brought to everything, and they would be fine. Better than fine, probably. Better than they'd be in that empty house with me, watching me check my phone every thirty seconds, absorbing my anxiety like small sponges soaking up whatever emotions filled the space around them.

"Tell them he went away for work," I said. "That's what I told them before."

The lie felt necessary. Protective. What else could I say? Your father climbed out a window to get away from me? He packed a bag and left and I don't know if he's coming back? They were too young for that kind of truth. Rose was only six. Mack was nine, old enough to understand more than I wanted him to, but still young enough to need protection from the sharp edges of adult failure.

Mum didn't argue. Didn't point out that lies had a way of unravelling, that children sensed more than adults gave them credit for, that the truth would come out eventually whether we wanted it to or not. She just nodded, accepting the instruction, adding it to the list of things she would manage in my absence.

"You should go and see them," she said. "They're in the sewing room. Asleep, probably, but—"

"No." The word came out too fast, too sharp. I softened my voice, tried again. "No, I don't want to wake them. It's late. They need their sleep."

It was true. It was also an excuse, and we both knew it.

The real truth was that I couldn't face them. Couldn't walk into that room and look at their sleeping faces—Mack's serious brow, Rose's tangle of hair, the way they curled towards each other for warmth even in sleep—without breaking completely. If I saw them, I would want to gather them up and hold them and promise that everything was going to be alright, and I couldn't make that promise. Didn't know if it was true. Didn't know anything anymore except that my husband had climbed out a window and wasn't answering his phone and the life I'd built was crumbling beneath my feet.

Better to let them sleep. Better to leave them here, in this safe house with its yellow kitchen and its familiar rhythms, and go back to my own house and figure out what came next. Better to fall apart in private, where they couldn't see.

"You should get some rest too," Mum said, and there it was—that note in her voice that had always made me bristle, that mixture of concern and instruction that felt like being managed rather than comforted. "You look exhausted, love. When did you last eat?"

"I'm fine."

"Claire—"

"I said I'm fine." I pushed back from the table, the chair scraping against the floor. "I should go. I just... I needed to tell you. About the kids staying. In case you were wondering why I wasn't picking them up tomorrow."

Mum stood too, her face creasing with worry. "You don't have to go back there tonight. I could make up the couch—"

"No." The thought of staying here, of being under Mum's watchful eye, of having to perform okayness for the next eight hours until the children woke—it was unbearable. I needed to be alone. Needed to be in my own space, even if that space was cold and empty and full of Paul's absence. "I need to go home. In case he—"

I didn't finish the sentence. In case he came back. In case he called. In case this was all just another one of his retreats and tomorrow we'd be right back where we started, pretending nothing had happened, smoothing over the cracks with silence and habit.

Mum followed me to the door. The hallway was dim, the only light coming from the kitchen behind us, and the sewing room door was closed—my children behind it, sleeping through this crisis the way children did, trusting the adults to keep the world steady while they dreamed.

I wanted to go to them. Wanted to crack open that door and slip inside and press my lips to their foreheads and breathe in the warm smell of them, the particular scent of childhood that meant safety and innocence and everything I was trying to protect.

I walked past the door without stopping.

"Call me in the morning," Mum said as I reached the front door. "Let me know you're alright."

"I will."

"And Claire—" She paused, and I turned to look at her, silhouetted against the light from the kitchen, her dressing gown pulled tight around her, her face impossible to read in the dimness. "Whatever happens with Paul... you're not alone in this. You know that, don't you?"

I nodded, because it was easier than explaining that being not-alone was exactly the problem sometimes. That her help came with expectations, her support with conditions, her love with all the complicated history of mothers and daughters who were too alike and too different at the same time.

"I know," I said. "Thanks, Mum."

I opened the door and stepped out into the cold.

The porch light was still on, casting its yellow glow across the path, and above it the stars still blazed in that endless Broken Hill sky. I walked to my car without looking back, without pausing, without doing anything except putting one foot in front of the other until I was behind the wheel again.

Through the windscreen, I saw the hallway light click off. The house went dark except for the porch light, steadfast and patient, waiting for whoever might need its guidance through the night.

I sat there for a moment, hands on the steering wheel, staring at the dark shape of the house where my children slept.

Then I started the engine and drove away.